The romantic writers and poets made a genuine break with the
rational, orderly thinking of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. While we still think
of Voltaire as a symbol of the power of reason, his contemporary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
was one of the early, prominent voices of nineteenth century romanticism. (Ayer, 171)

One of the enlightenment philosophes, Denis Diderot, described
Rousseau as a madman and a damned soul and "wrote that the poets had been right in
placing an immense interval between heaven and hell, implying that Rousseau resided in
hell. Strachey's comment on this is that Diderot was wrong. `The...[huge gap], across
which, so strangely and so horribly, he had caught glimpses of what he had never seen
before, was not the abyss between heaven and hell, but between the old world and the
new.'" (Ayer, 171)

The high priest of Romanticism was Jean Jacques Rousseau
(1712-1778). Rousseau's mother died at his birth, and his father raised him with no
discipline and very little education. Rousseau grew up in beautiful, rural Switzerland,
which taught him to love nature; however, thanks to his irresponsible father, Rousseau
never learned self-discipline, nor did he have any patience with external controls.
Rousseau never could tolerate any discipline, which can be seen in all of his writings,
which are celebrations of the joys of radical individual freedom.

Rousseau ran away at sixteen and wandered for twenty years. He
worked at various odd jobs during this time, but never stuck to anything.

Eventually he came to Paris where he wrote a few articles for the
Encyclopedia and some music and poetry.

Rousseau published four important books:

New Heloise (1760)

Émile (1762)

Social Contract (1762)

Confessions (1781)

These books were very popular and made a profound impression on
European thinking, especially influencing the Romantic movement. Rousseau has been called
the father of the Romantic movement because his "enthusiasm for nature and his appeal
to the emotions ...opened the way for...the Romantic... [movement].... His ideas
stimulated or inspired..." many other writers. (Ergang, 641)

New Heloise, Rousseau's first book is a romantic story told
in the form of letters. One of the main themes is the beauties of nature and the simple
life as opposed to the corrupt and artificial life in the cities. (Ergang, 640)

Rousseau thought that human beings were born naturally good and that
they were corrupted by bad institutions such as governments, schools, cities and armies,
which caused the social inequality, suffering and injustice that were everywhere around
him. Rousseau's solution to the misery of life in his time was to change the laws and
institutions.

These changes would occur by people returning to nature and the
natural state of human goodness, uncorrupted by institutions that supported inequality and
oppression. In such a natural state, Rousseau thought, the few would not oppress the many.

Rousseau's notion that nature was essentially kindly and good was
the creation of his own imagination. However, as Ergang comments, Rousseau's "`back
to nature'" gospel was...the most powerful regenerative force of the late eighteenth
century, and of the nineteenth--one which turned the thought of Europe into new channels.
There are few men in the history of modern times who have influenced the mind of the world
as profoundly as did Rousseau. Politics, education, religion, aesthetics, morals, and
literature all bear the impress of the ideas he proclaimed." (Ergang, 643)

Émile(1762) has had tremendous impact on modern theories
of elementary education. In Émile, Rousseau described a new form of education which was
based on fostering the natural abilities of each child instead of trying to force all
children into a single mold. This radically new method of education would preserve the
child's natural goodness instead of corrupting it. (Ergang, 641)

In Social Contract Rousseau argues that the existence
of all states is based on a "social contract" which may be written or simply
understood. In this contract, the members of the state surrender their individual rights
to the "general will."

Since the power of the state comes from the power of the people,
each one of those people is ultimately the source of all state power, and therefore
absolutely free.

According to Ergang, "the Social Contract is one of
the most influential political treatises of all time. Hardly a measure was framed in the
early part of the French Revolution which does not bear the mark of this 'Bible of
democratic government,' as it has been styled." (Ergang, 641)

Confessions was written between 1765 and 1770; it was
published posthumously in 1781.

Rousseau had received much attention because
of New Heloise, Émile, and Social Contract. Much of it was positive; however, much was outrage at his
radical ideas and Rousseau had to flee the country to avoid being sent to prison.
According to Ergang, this "...opposition... made him suspicious and misanthropic. His
sensitiveness was aggravated to such an extent that he suffered much from imaginary as
well as from real attacks. In the hope that he might justify himself to posterity,
Rousseau wrote his autobiography or Confessions...." (Ergang, 642) Rousseau wanted
to demonstrate that he was, despite all his faults, basically good.

"How could I become wicked, when I had nothing but
examples of gentleness before my eyes, and none around me but the best people in the
world."WL1631

Before Rousseau, almost no one wrote autobiographies except a few
deeply religious people who wanted to guide others in their spiritual development. People
generally had seen themselves as members of a social unit, not as individuals, so the very
concept of autobiography was not particularly interesting or relevant. Each person was
thought to be much like each other.

However, according to J. M. Cohen, "By Rousseau's age ... men
had begun to see themselves not as atoms in a society that stretched down from God to the
world of nature but as unique individuals, important in their own right."
(Cohen, 7)
It was this emerging idea of the unique individual which made possible a book such as the
Confessions,
which started fully aware of how radical an undertaking it was:

"I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without
precedent, and which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the
likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself.

"Myself alone! I know the feelings of my heart, and I
know men. I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not
made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am
different." (Norton WL1629-30)

Rousseau believed that emotion, which came from nature and from
sexual love, was the core of his being and the source of his inspiration.

"My passions have made me live, and my passions have
killed me. What passions? will be asked. Trifles, the most childish things in the world,
which, however, excited me as much as if the possession of Helen or the throne of the
universe had been at stake. In the first place--women. When I possessed one, my senses
were calm, my heart, never. The needs of love devoured me in the midst of enjoyment; I had
a tender mother, a dear friend; but I needed a mistress. I imagined one in her place...

"Thus I was burning with love, without an
object..." (Norton WL1638)

This objectless yearning is the
very essence of the romantic stance, the longing for the objects of imagination rather
than the objects or persons really present. Rousseau makes his own emotions, his own
longings, the subject matter of his writing. This is a far cry indeed from the objective
distance Voltaire takes from poor Candide.

What, exactly, was so new about the Romantic world view? First of
all, the Romantics turned away from the intellectual tradition of the Western World which
held that reason was the way to know and understand the world. Instead, the Romantics
chose to embrace imagination and feeling as truer ways of understanding the world.

While traditional western culture had thought of poets as holding up
a mirror to nature and imitating what they saw there, the Romantic period changed that
image to a fountain or a lamp which gave out from itself instead of simply mirroring the
world around it.

The poet now was thought of as creating the poetic vision out of a
mixture of imagination and personal experience, not simply finding and recording the world
as it was or should be.

The Romantics loved wild landscapes and uncivilized peoples. They
preferred quaint villages and foreign wildernesses to the cities of Europe. The Romantics
were fascinated by exotic stories and eccentric individuals; they loved the
"folk" and folktales and rejected much of the traditional, upper-class culture
of the eighteenth century, preferring the Middle Ages, foreign nationals, and colorful
ethnic cultures.

One example of this folktale, medieval exoticism is John Keats'
"La Belle Dame sans Merci" which tells a tale about a knight languishing in
thrall to a magical fairy lady. He had been riding along when he met a beautiful lady.
They got along just fine until she took him home with her and lulled him to sleep; he
dreamed of death-pale kings, princes and warriors:

They cried, "La belle dame sans merci

Thee hath in thrall!"

I saw their starved lips in the gloam

With horrid warning gaped wide,

And I awoke, and found me here

On the cold hill's side.

And this is why I sojourn here,

Alone and palely loitering;

Though the sedge withered from the lake

And no birds sing. (Norton, WL, )

Poor fellow, he's come to a typical, wretched, yet exotic Romantic
ending. Notice, by the way, how the knight's paleness matches the withered sedge and how
his misery matches the lack of birdsong. Romantic poets were particularly sensitive to the
relationship between human emotions and the surrounding landscape.

Indeed, the Romantic landscape is one of human emotion blended with
rugged mountains, wild grottoes and untamed countryside. This interaction of emotion and
scenery is typical of Romantic poetry, whether it involves giving human personality to a
natural object, such as a tree, or tying the landscape to the mood of the poet. "A
Spruce is Standing Lonely," by Heine is a good example of a Romantic poet infusing
natural objects with human emotions:

A spruce is standing lonely

in the North on a barren height.

He drowses; ice and snowflakes

wrap him in a blanket of white.

He dreams about a palm tree

in a distant, eastern land,

that languishes lonely and silent

upon the scorching sand. (Norton, WL)

The tree, just like a person, is lonely, sleeps and has dreams of an
exotic love far away. The isolated landscape each tree sits in is a reflection of the
isolated emotions of each tree, another typical Romantic device.

Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" personifies the wind into
a spirit of nature:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Thou, from
whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing...

Not only is the wind given a superhuman personality, but it can
inspire the poet as in these further lines from the same poem, where the poet cries to the
wind:

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! (Norton, WL )

Here the relationship between poet and nature is complete; nature in
the form of the West Wind is personified into a spirit. The poet receives his inspiration
from the spirit of the West Wind, and the poet wants to join his spirit to the spirit of
the West Wind. Further, the poet's depressed mood meets its perfect match in the bleak
autumnal scene.

Note, also, the line: "Make me thy lyre, even as the forest
is." The image of the poet as a lyre, or an aeolian harp (a wind harp) is an
important romantic concept. The poet does not just see the landscape and copy it; rather,
he is a sensitive instrument upon which nature plays, like the wind upon the strings of a
harp, and the consequent poem is a creative product of this interaction between nature and
the poet.

Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" also expresses this
interaction between the poet and nature:

O Lady! we receive but what we give,

And in our life alone does Nature live:

.......................................................

Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth

A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud

Enveloping the Earth--

And from the soul itself must there be sent

A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,

Of all sweet sounds the life and element! (Norton, WL
)

The beauty we see in the world is not out there in the world, but
comes from human perception and emotion; beauty is a creature of our own creative
imagination; this beauty is what the romantic poet creates in his poetry; he is not
imitating the world as in a mirror, but setting it forth in luminous glory, as by the
light of the lamp of his own imagination.

Fantasy was also much appreciated by the romantic poets. Perhaps the
most famous fantasy poem of this period is "Kubla Khan" by Coleridge. It is a
fragment, supposedly remembered from an interrupted opium dream, about a fantastic world:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea. (Norton, WL)

Such a poem is purely a creation of the poet's imagination; there is
no observed landscape to be transformed by poetic creativity, but simply the poet's mind,
and the words of the poem which create images that never existed before.

"How do I feel?" was a major question for Rousseau and the
Romantics. Where Voltaire and his friends believed that they could think through a problem
and come to a reasonable answer, Rousseau and the Romantics cried, NO! thinking will not
give us the answers we need to the meaning of life nor help us to experience the essential
nature of being and the world; we must FEEL what is right and learn to know about the
world through our feelings. This reliance on feeling over thought was based on a belief
that human beings were naturally good and capable of recognizing the good when they
experienced it. Rousseau, especially, thought that people's natural feelings were sound;
only corrupt civilization could distort people into brutal, unfeeling monsters.

Romantic poet's feelings, however, were likely to be depressed, or
at least feelings of dejection inspired a number of romantic poems, such as Coleridge's
"Dejection: An Ode," Keats' "Ode on Melancholy," and Shelley's
"Stanzas Written in Dejection--December 1818, Near Naples," where the poet
complains:

The French Revolution occurred in 1789. It overthrew the thoroughly
corrupt Old Regime, but then dragged on into an extended horror of killings within France,
known as "The Terror" as well as war with other countries and more European
revolutions in the nineteenth century. Violent change became the norm for this period.
Such change was based at least partly on the hope for a better life; however the change
itself was frightening and often destructive.

The French Revolution was a major influence on the Romantics, as
were the wars and revolutions that followed. Romantic poets wrote about the corruption of
governments and the human suffering caused by violence. One example of a Romantic
political poem is Victor Hugo's "Memory of the Night of the Fourth" which
describes a child shot by the soldiers of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte during civil
disturbances in 1851:

"The child had been struck by two bullets in the head.

The dwelling was clean and modest, peaceful and good.

Above a picture, a blessed branch, and in the room

An old grandmother--weeping.

We undressed him in silence. His pale mouth open.

Death was clouding over his vivid eye

His arms hanging down seemed a cry for help.

In his pocket, a boxwood spinning-top." (Norton WL
)

The poem continues with the grandmother speaking her grief and
wondering why Mr. Bonaparte had to kill a child. The narrator explains that Mr. Bonaparte
wanted fancy palaces and wealth and respect:

"That's why it has to be this way: old grandmothers

With their poor gray fingers shaking with age

Must sew in winding-sheets children of seven."

(Norton WL )

This poem expresses anger at the cruel irrationality of a government
that somehow allows children to die in order to provide palaces for rulers. The attention
to the details of a modest home, the top in the child's pocket, the old grandmother, these
too are the stuff of romantic poetry. The effect is not elegant, but pathetic. We are
intended to feel for the child's death and feel outrage at Mr. Bonaparte and his corrupt
state.

Not all romantic poets were anti-establishment all the time. Some
were more worried by the radical revolutionaries than by the corruption of governments. My
favorite political poem of this sort is Heine's "The Migratory Rats." These
rats, while delightfully rat-like, are also uncannily similar to a pack of nineteenth
century radicals seeking to overturn everything and re-divide the world according to their
needs.

There are two kinds of rat

The hungry and the fat;

The fat ones happily stay at home,

But the hungry ones set out to roam.

..............................................

A sensuous mob, they think

Only of food and drink;

They ignore, since food is their only goal,

The immortality of the soul.

For such a brutal rat

Fears neither hell nor cat;

No goods, nor money they ever acquire,

To redivide the world they desire. (Norton WL )

This poem is interesting because it does not idealize the fat rats,
nor deny the reality of the hungry rats' needs, but it does not condone their method of
dealing with their hunger--revolution. It is also amusing; I can imagine it as a scenario
for a Disney cartoon.

And of course, the Romantics wrote about human love, especially in
its more unusual variations. "The Asra," also by Heine is a good example of the
Romantic blend of exoticism and love. A beautiful daughter of the Sultan walks every
evening by a fountain; a young slave stands by the fountain every evening,
growing ever
paler. Finally the princess asks him his name and kin. He replies:

............................ "Mohamet

Is my name, I am from Yemen,

And my kinsmen are the Asra,

They who die when love befalls them." (Norton WL
)

What could be more romantic? An exotic, distant setting in the
fabled, Arab world, a slave in love with a princess, a tribe of men who die of love, and
the slave growing paler and paler, obviously dying of love for the princess. This is the
stuff of romantic fantasy, indeed.

Perhaps most important for us, the Romantics were the start of the
modern western worldview, which sees people as free individuals seeking fulfillment
through democratic processes, rather than as bound members of a traditional, authoritarian
community. The sixties hippies seeking peace and happiness; the eighties yuppies doing
their own thing; the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in the name of freedom: all are
direct descendents of the Romantics, tearing loose from the tight social fabric of the
community and seeking happiness and fulfillment at a personal level.